About Season for Sharing

We will match your donation; 100 percent goes to local non-profits.

Who is helped?

Last year, 133 Arizona agencies received $2.74 million to help at-risk children and families, improve educational skills, aid victims of domestic violence, and serve the elderly. Since 1993, more than $51 million have been distributed through Season for Sharing.

Where does the money go?

It all stays here in Arizona. One hundred percent of your donation and the matching funds go directly to non-profit agencies in the Valley and state. All overhead and fundraising costs are paid for by The Arizona Republic, azcentral.com and 12News.

How do my dollars help?

The Gannett Foundation and our community partner, the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust, will multiply your generosity by matching your gift 50 cents on the dollar until donations reach $800,000. That’s an extra $400,000 to local agencies. If you donate $50, it becomes a $75 contribution.

Who makes this possible?

The Arizona Republic, azcentral.com, 12 News and the Gannett Foundation. Season for Sharing is a donor-advised fund of the Arizona Community Foundation.

To donate, go to sharing.azcentral.com or use the coupon on Page A2 of The Republic and mail your donation to Season for Sharing, P.O. Box 29616, Phoenix, AZ 85038-9616.

Bill Pasco was never able to read the daily newspaper as many others do.

After he graduated from college, he landed a job as an operations engineer at a radio station in the Midwest that provided a reading service and programming for people who have visual impairments, like him.

“I was forced to listen to people reading the newspaper every day, and I had no idea how much information there was there that people take for granted,” he said. “I was hooked.”

Seventeen years ago, he came to Sun Sounds of Arizona, where he is now the director.

Sun Sounds is a free audio service for people who cannot read print, either because they’re visually impaired or because they have a mobility issue, such as Parkinson’s disease, that prevents them from holding a newspaper or a book.

It is among the programs and services that have benefited from the annual Season for Sharing campaign sponsored by The Arizona Republic, 12 News and azcentral .com.

The variety of material that is read aloud is vast.

“Our listeners want to hear the same material that everyone else reads,” said David Noble, development director.

Besides TheRepublic and other local newspapers, the programming includes readings of children’s stories, grocery-store coupons, short stories, magazines such as Vanity Fair, theNew Yorker, TV Guide and Rolling Stone — even a reading of satirical media outlet the “Onion.” Other segments focus on cooking, gardening, history, travel, science, theater, community events, health news, job openings and the stock market.

The newspapers are read live every morning, but more than 85 percent of the material is prerecorded in the studio, housed at Rio Salado College in Tempe.

Programming also includes a monthly movie that uses Descriptive Video Service, with narration synced to the action on the screen.

There are four hours a week of Spanish content, including grocery ads.

Sun Sounds receives support from Rio Salado, which pays the salaries of the four managers, but the organization must raise $600,000 a year to pay for everything else, Pasco said.

“Our audience tends to be people of limited means, with many unemployed or retired,” he said. “They’re not in a position themselves to support us.”

The programming contains no advertising.

Besides the Tempe studio, there are also Sun Sounds outlets in Flagstaff, Tucson and Yuma.

The service is available several ways, including live streaming on the Web, via phone, on a smartphone app, on a podcast, at 89.5-3 on any HD radio and through a dedicated “talking” radio provided by Sun Sounds. The radios cost the program about $100 each and “speak” the station numbers and other actions.

The service became the first in the nation to offer its content via live streaming on the Internet, in 1998.

Subscribers who use the phone part of the service, called Sun Dial, can hear live or recorded content or can browse through Internet sites using voice commands.

Sun Sounds couldn’t work without volunteers. More than 500 volunteers across the state provide more than 20,000 hours of assistance, not only by reading but also by doing office work and helping during fundraisers.

The volunteer readers must take a vocabulary test and are screened to make sure they are good at reading aloud and don’t have a strong accent.

Volunteer Dawn Leinfelder said that reading the sports section is particularly tricky, with so many players from other countries. She’s tripped up pronouncing Goran Dragic of the Suns.

The newspaper readers have a tricky task: to make the articles fit the time allotted. They prep for an hour before the 21/2-hour show, cutting the newspaper apart and reading each story individually to reduce the crinkling noise.

All sections of the newspaper are read, including news, business, sports, the horoscopes, Dear Abby, the food section and the obituaries.

Like many newspapers, Sun Sounds is switching its materials to an all-digital format, in which the volunteers will choose stories from the online editions and route them to screens in the studio, where they can personalize the font and type size before reading them aloud.

Morrie Hesch, who is retired from the wholesale auto-parts business, became a Sun Sounds reader two years because people always complimented his distinctive voice. Since then, he’s served as an ambassador, going into the community to meet listeners and promote the service.

“I discovered that to some of our subscribers, Sun Sounds is their only connection to the outside world,” he said.

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